Teachers dive into workshop

ND program offers experiments to take back to classrooms.

ND program offers experiments to take back to classrooms.

July 08, 2008|GENE STOWE Tribune Correspondent

SOUTH BEND Five days after the zebra fish eggs were fertilized in a University of Notre Dame laboratory, embryonic hearts were beating and some of the young, out of the egg sac, were floundering around the petri dish under the eyes of 27 Michiana teachers. The kindergarten through high school teachers were in class this summer to participate in an experiment they'll take back to their classrooms in the coming academic year, breathing new life into biology studies. "It's a really neat hands-on experience," said Lindsay Althouse, a third-grade teacher at Kennedy Primary Academy in South Bend. "I think the kids will learn a lot from watching the embryo develop." The BioEYES activity, developed by Jamie Shuda in Philadelphia, practiced in Baltimore and brought to Michiana through the Notre Dame extended Research Community, is a one-week study in genetics and embryonics tailored to different grade levels. Shuda and her colleague Danielle Sixsmith worked with teachers at the recent weeklong institute. Teachers were already discussing ways to extend the learning for more time and perhaps in other courses. "You can do a lot of pre-activities," said Kristin Darden, a fifth-grade teacher at St. Joseph School in South Bend. "You can do post-activities, follow-up activities. It allows us to bring biology into the classroom, to have the equipment. "We try to have a lot of activities in our classroom. This gives them a lot of different skills. They get to use a microscope and see something develop rapidly over a short period of time." The activity starts on a Monday when teams of students, with the help of Notre Dame graduate students, choose a pair of fish and place them in a breeding tank. On Tuesday, fertilized eggs are transferred to petri dishes where the zebra fish will grow through the week in translucent egg sacs. "The kids are going to feel ownership of their fish," said Larry Laskoski, a biology teacher at Washington High School. "They basically created these fish. They chose the parents and produce the offspring." The different traits of wild-type, albino and mixed zebra fish show up in the embryos, accommodating genetic study. Potential topics include cell structure and function, comparative anatomy and heredity. Students can analyze such data as the number of eggs laid by each pair and the number of eggs fertilized by each pair. Teachers were already imagining how to make changes that would expand the experiment. An unexpected opportunity to compare conditions came when the petri dishes were left out the first night and varying temperatures in the lab affected the rates of development. Professional Specialist Patrick Mooney of Notre Dame's Department of Physics, project coordinator for Notre Dame extended Research Community, said a pilot BioEYES last year involved three schools, but some 50 teachers applied for the summer institute when they heard about the activity at a forum in December. Other interested teachers will be added next year. "We're engaging them in learning experiences in modern biology techniques, and they're taking to it like fish to water," Mooney says. Teachers at the weeklong institute spent two hours each morning with the zebra fish and 1 1/2 hours doing modern biology lab experiments. Afternoon activities included talks about pedagogy, a tour of biology laboratories on campus and shared presentations about the work. "We're going to be taking what we learned here into our classroom," said Melissa LaPlace, an eighth-grade teacher at Navarre Intermediate Center. "We're learning it, but we also have to go back and teach it." "It's exciting to be able to bring something so innovative and new to the students instead of the typical things that happen in the biology class," said Alicia Harkins-Pritchett, who will start teaching biology at Mishawaka High School this fall. "Not a lot of students have that experience before they go to college."